All movies serve as escapism: no matter what you’re watching, it’s always someone else’s experience. As I argued in this week’s issue, the recent art film The Kid With a Bike works as escapist entertainment because its writer-directors, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, incorporate aspects of popular storytelling to bring greater urgency to a realistic story. There’s a similar interaction between fantasy and realism in much of the so-called Slow Cinema that’s become a familiar presence at film festivals in the past decade (Sukhdev Sandhu provided an overview of the trend in the Guardian a few weeks ago). This strain of contemporary art cinema, named after its predilection for longer takes, generally eschews music and dialogue for naturalistic sound design and nonverbal action. For cosmopolitan spectators, the films offer momentary escape from the white noise (of cell phones, televisions, traffic, etc) that pervades so much of daily life.